The above examples work by replacing the normal git commit editor with a call to git interpret-trailers, which appends the desired tag to the commit message and then exits.

My specific use case is to add Reviewed-by: tags to specific commits during interactive rebase, e.g.:

> git rebase --interactive HEAD~3

This brings up an editor with a list of the top three commits in the current branch. Assuming the aforementioned rb alias has been configured, individual commits will be given a Reviewed-by tag when appended with the following line:

exec GIT_EDITOR="git rb" git commit --amend

As an example, the following will see three commits applied, with the commit message for two of them (d9e994e and 5f8c115) appended with my Reviewed-by tag.

Bonus: By default, the vim editor includes git rebase --interactive syntax highlighting and key-bindings - if you press K while hovering over a commit hash (e.g. d9e994e from above), vim will call git show <commit-hash>, making reviewing and tagging even faster!

Thanks to:

Upstream Git developers, especially those who implemented the interpret-trailers functionality.